480GB is the new 240GB: Crucial’s M500 SSD reviewed

SSDs are cheaper than ever. How does the latest generation stack up?

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Remember Intel's old X25-M SSD? The drive came out in 2008 and played a big role in seeding a solid-state storage revolution that continues to sweep across the PC industry. SSDs have come a long way since those early days, when the X25-M 80GB was considered a relative bargain at $600. That worked out to seven dollars per gigabyte, a far cry from the sub-$1 prices that have democratized the technology in recent years.

There is perhaps no better illustration of how far we've come than Crucial's new M500 SSD. For the same $600 asking price as the old X25-M, one variant of the M500 delivers a staggering 960GB of storage. Do the math, and you're looking at 63 cents per gig—an order of magnitude reduction in cost. How's that for progress?

Fittingly, these lower prices have been driven in part by cooperation between Intel and Micron, Crucial's parent company, who collaborate on NAND production through a joint venture dubbed IM Flash Technologies. IMFT fabbed the 50-nm flash chips for the X25-M, and it has since moved to finer process tech at 35, 25, and now 20 nanometers. Each new process packs more gigabytes per wafer, increasing bit densities and decreasing prices.

While the M500 960GB represents a sort of pinnacle for SSD progression, its $600 price tag is still rather steep. The 240 and 480GB versions are more affordable, and those are the ones we've gathered to review today. As you'll see, there's much more to the M500 than its peak capacity.

Meet the new flash

As you've probably deduced already, the M500's MLC memory chips are built on a 20-nm manufacturing process. There's a difference between this NAND and what's lurking inside Intel's 20-nm 335 Series, though. The memory chips in the Intel and most other contemporary SSDs weigh in at 64Gb (8GB) each, while the M500's NAND chips have twice that capacity.

This is the first drive we've seen with 128Gb NAND, and the shift has interesting implications. For one, it makes hitting higher capacities possible with fewer dies, which is probably part of the reason the 960GB drive costs much less than its terabyte-class peers. Having fewer dies isn't always better, though. SSD controllers rely on parallelism for maximum performance; past a certain point, drives with fewer NAND dies are actually slower.

With most SSDs, performance starts to fall off at capacities below 240-256GB, suggesting that current controllers favor 32-die configurations. That makes sense, since most controllers have eight channels and can address four chips per channel. The M500 240GB uses only 16 flash dies, and its performance specifications reveal that configuration isn't ideal.

To see the M500's full performance potential, you'll need at least the 480GB version. The 240GB model has a much slower sequential write speed rating, and its random I/O rates are lower, as well. The 120GB drive is slower still, with only one NAND die for each of the controller's eight channels. No wonder Crucial is skipping a 60GB variant.

There's no difference in the performance ratings attached to the 480 and 960GB models, though. Also, note how the per-gigabyte price goes up as the drive capacity drops. Somewhat surprisingly, the 960GB drive delivers the best value of the bunch; it's the only one that dips close to 60 cents per gig. The prices for the other models are nothing special.

Beneath its grey metal exterior, the M500 is anchored by a Marvell 88SS9187 controller chip. This is an eight-channel design with—you guessed it—four chip-enables per channel. The controller combines a dual-core CPU with a 6Gbps SATA interface and support for DDR3 cache memory. It also has a built-in RAID engine and hardware support for 256-bit AES encryption.

The RAID engine works in conjunction with RAIN, a flash redundancy scheme that's also employed by Micron's enterprise-grade SSDs. This mechanism reserves a portion of the flash for parity data, which is why the M500 series has somewhat lower capacities, similar to those of SandForce-based drives.

Crucial also takes advantage of the Marvell controller's encryption hardware. The M500 supports the TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE 1667 standards, making it compatible with the BitLocker encryption built into Windows 8. This is the first SSD we've seen with explicit support for Win8's encryption tech.

In addition to protecting bits and bytes from prying eyes, the M500 guards against data loss due to unexpected power failures. See all the little capacitors in the bottom right corner of the circuit board pictured above? Those store enough power to allow the M500 to shut down gracefully if the lights go out or your battery dies.

Speaking of mobile applications, the M500 comes in a slim 7-mm form factor compatible with thinner notebooks. The drive still has the standard mounting holes used by all 2.5" notebook drives, and Crucial includes an adhesive-backed spacer to ensure a tight fit in 9.5-mm notebook bays. Versions of the M500 with even smaller mSATA and NGFF M.2 form factors are also in the works, although they'll be limited to 480GB and smaller capacities.

To deal with cramped notebook internals that have little airflow, the M500 employs an adaptive thermal management system. If the drive temperature exceeds 70°C, "NAND operations" are reduced by "approximately 40 percent" until thermals return to normal. This throttling doesn't affect the speed of the SATA link, but it will lower overall drive performance.

Like most consumer-grade SSDs, the M500 is covered by a three-year warranty. Crucial says the drive can withstand 40GB of writes per day for five years, which works out to 72 terabytes—plenty for even relatively heavy use. It's worth noting that this endurance specification is considerably more optimistic than the one slapped on Intel's 335 Series SSD. That 20-nm drive is only rated for 20GB per day for three years, or 22TB in total.

The effects of cell degradation and interference are more pronounced on NAND chips built with finer fabrication processes, so the M500's generous endurance rating is certainly comforting. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to monitor flash wear or how many bytes have been written to the drive. Unlike rivals Intel and Samsung, Crucial doesn't provide utility software with a built-in health indicator. The M500's payload of SMART attributes doesn't contain any references to flash wear or bytes written, either. Several of the SMART attributes are labeled "Vendor-specific," but you'll need to guess what they track and read the associated values using third-party software.

Without accompanying software, the M500's overall package feels especially spartan. It doesn't help that the drive is shipped without the 3.5" bay adapter commonly included with 2.5" SSDs. That plastic spacer is the only other thing in the box.

58 Reader Comments

Looks nice for the higher capacity models but for the 240 gig model, a size that would probably be the most popular, you can get twice the write speed for around the same price. A good example would be OCZ Vertex 4 256 gig which one could get as an Amazon Warehouse Deal for $220 or the Samsung 840 Pro 256 gig at around $230. Why would they cripple that popularly sized and priced drive? Makes no sense.

It's not a matter of intentionally crippling. The drive's performance depends on the controller being able to do things to lots of different NAND chips at once. The 240GB has fewer physical NAND chips, and so the controller can only do what it can do. Add more chips and the controller can do more things at the same time and the drive gets faster.

Buying an SSD for me has so far always been a matter of compromise, because they've never been big enough. A 960GB SSD is right at the bottom end of what I'd consider desirable for my desktops and laptops, so this is great news. I'll be buying several of these over the next year or so. Splitting work between a small SSD for boot & apps and a larger HDD for docs & media is a pain in the ass--I'd rather just throw a bit more money at the problem and keep everything on one drive.

I've been using the old M4 512GB in my laptop (actually have two of them) and they have been extremely fast and solid.

The only thing I would say is that a lot of people who are serious about their SSD performance will use two drives (one for the system / apps .. and another one for their core applications, be them modelling files or virtual machines).

In this scenario the 240GB drives are sometimes more popular because a higher priced single drive is typically too expensive to buy many of them

And I expect a M500 240GB in the mail today to use for the wife's rebuild . My purchase was based on overall reliability of Crucial drives among other purchasers and my success with a m4 128GB (other than some annoying install problems with Windows the first time, which I was never 100% sure if it that was the problem). I was leaning to a Samsung but went with Crucial again I wonder if any firmware updates will help improve the 240GB. The power loss saving is a nice feature for those of us still not on a UPS.

Now, if I tested the M500 and another drive with real life use, I probably will never notice the difference other than moving a large file, which I will have on a 1-3TB HDD anyway.

I'm probably going to be using the 960 in my upcoming Haswell build. With a 500GB SDD like I was planning on buying I'd still need an HD to provide media storage overflow; which would put the total cost at ~$450-500; and would probably end up spending another $300ish a 1TB SDD as part of my 2 year hardware refresh when the 500 started getting tight for app data anyway. With an ~400GB total data footprint however my entire system will fit nicely on a 1 TB SSD and will probably give me enough storage to not have to worry about upgrading for about 4 years when I do my next full system build (using whatever comes after Skymont).

The 960GB version is pretty interesting just based on the price - roughly equivalent to the 840 series per GB, without the slightly worrying triple-NAND flash, and in a higher capacity per drive - but all of the smaller versions are a distinct "meh, pass" for me.

Thank god. My 256GB in my ultrabook has about 15GB left on it and truth be told I've avoided copying my lightroom folder over because I don't have the space. For those folks who say that SSD is a perfectly justifiable replacement for a traditional hard drive....tell that to my primary Alienware laptop that has a 500GB 7200RPM drive that has 6GB of space left on it.

Some of us have a ton of crap we store. I'm waiting for the day when I can get a speedy SSD 1TB drive for under $400-$300. When that day comes I'll be able to mostly accept that hard drives are truly on the way out.

So, does memory scale really well cost-wise? Or is the market sensitive to the fact that these things can't be made large enough to act as storage drives, and 120gb is all you need for an OS drive?

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but flash memory is more expensive than rotating media to manufacture. The drives are sized to keep them priced for the consumer market. The reason the 960GB drive is so relatively inexpenseive ($/G) is, I'm guessing, because the chipset and other components make up a smaller portion of the cost. In other words, no matter which size you buy, you have to pay for the case, the circuit board, etc. All that's added on the larger versions are more chips, essentially. This is historically what we see on standard magnetic media as well, for the same reasons.

Buying an SSD for me has so far always been a matter of compromise, because they've never been big enough. A 960GB SSD is right at the bottom end of what I'd consider desirable for my desktops and laptops, so this is great news. I'll be buying several of these over the next year or so. Splitting work between a small SSD for boot & apps and a larger HDD for docs & media is a pain in the ass--I'd rather just throw a bit more money at the problem and keep everything on one drive.

For a laptop, sure, but for your desktop also? I just put in a 256GB Samsung 830 as a new system drive, put all my apps & most played games, and it's not even half full atm. Of course I have 2 2TB data drives in the case and more on the network.

Excellent write up, however I still cannot swallow the SSD prices, as low as they may have come.

Saying that prices of $0.63/GB is better than $7/GB of the original Intel 80GB SSD is a true statement. From a purely numbers standpoint, the $0.63/GB drive is many times cheaper. If, however, you compare $0.63/GB to the $0.04/GB you can get when you snag a 3TB drive on a good sale, that also is many magnitudes cheaper. Unfortunately, I can't look at the SSD price as anything but high, as low as it may have come from the very beginning.

I have used a loaner ultrabook for a great length of time with an SSD and must say the results are impressive. I am aware of what SSDs can do, I've seen the Crystal Disk Mark results to back it up, and cold booting Windows 7 in 3 seconds is quite frankly amazing. I still, however, cannot justify the price. I have a gaming/media center/BOINC PC at home with 7 TB of storage, and I can't seem to justify an SSD for that for occasional gaming and those massive storage needs. I also can't justify a SSD on my budget laptop that I occasionally use for productivity. Sure, waking up from sleep instantly is neat, and having Microsoft Word open instantly after the double click is equally as neat, but at least for me the price has not hit the point where that "neat" is "gotta have". A 600% or more increase in price over traditional spinning media kills the neat factor for my cheap-skate brain.

Hopefully soon. I really do like the performance and have almost been tempted on some refurbs and rebate deals.. but the cheapskate part of my brain is still holding out.

It's crippling when that is what they are settling for when the competition is offering much better for the same size class of drive and for around the same price. As, I said, that makes no sense. Why would anyone buy the 240 gig model over the two drives I mentioned? Only if they were ignorant.

To be fair the write speed could go up later with a firmware update but as it stands I wouldn't buy the 240 gig or below models.

I understand your point, but I think in reality it's just that Crucial is the first in the industry to switch over. Over the course of the year, I'm sure everyone will follow suit with larger chips for the cost advantage. 240G is popular not because it's 240G, but because it's in the $250-400 price sweet spot over the last year, and that's quickly becoming the 480/512G models. Newegg has Samsung 840 pro 512's for $519 (1.01/GB), the M500 480 is $389 (.81/GB). (The Samsung 840 non-pro is cheaper, but the performance of the M500 is on par with the 840 pro)

Besides, they're not THAT bad, still SSD class. The 240's are on par with everyone else's 120's, and plenty of people buy those.

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yep. Have 3 Sammys at home and no problems at all, 8 at work no problems there either. 100% reliability gives little to complain about.

On the other hand... had 2 kingstons V100 disks:both were the most unreliable pieces of **** you can ever imagine. I will never buy from Kingston again if they are 25% of other companies. Lost data and a whole lot of precious time because Kingston can't get their crap straight.

How does today's MLC technology stack up against yesterday's SLC? I have an intel X25-E 64GB SLC -- this type of SSD is real solid and I'll never have to worry about it (I use it in my laptop, not a server). But are new MLC SSDs ever going to attain the reliability of old SLCs?

How does today's MLC technology stack up against yesterday's SLC? I have an intel X25-E 64GB SLC -- this type of SSD is real solid and I'll never have to worry about it (I use it in my laptop, not a server). But are new MLC SSDs ever going to attain the reliability of old SLCs?

Endurance has gone up on both, mostly due to controller tech and things like RAIN. Looking back, today's MLC is supposedly about as endurant as early SLCs, and today's SLC is even better.

Man, I got my first SSD for a laptop last night. Samsung 840 250GB. What a difference from the old HDD. Seeing prices like this on the Crucial makes me excited that when it's time to upgrade my desktop with an SSD, cost per GB will be much further down.

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yeah I've been thinking about buying a ~500GB Samsung 840 drive for a while. This is slower than the Pro and the normal 840 is about $50 cheaper for a slight hit to write speed. For gaming and normal day to day I can't see the paying more for either the Crucial or the Pro.

There is perhaps no better illustration of how far we've come than Crucial's new M500 SSD. For the same $600 asking price as the old X25-M, one variant of the M500 delivers a staggering 960GB of storage. Do the math, and you're looking at 63 cents per gig—an order of magnitude reduction in cost. How's that for progress?

Not really that much progress when comparatively I can yield roughly 18 Terabytes of storage for that same $600 through HDDs.

I'd really like to see a combo drive with 256GB SSD and 1TB HD for a competitive price...say < $400...with the option of having it show up as a single logical drive for the massess or as distinct logical drives for the tech savy micro manager.

I have a 256GB SSD and a 500GB HD in my Macbook Pro right now, but it's heavy and power hungry to have two separate drive enclosures/controllers/etc.

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yeah I've been thinking about buying a ~500GB Samsung 840 drive for a while. This is slower than the Pro and the normal 840 is about $50 cheaper for a slight hit to write speed. For gaming and normal day to day I can't see the paying more for either the Crucial or the Pro.

Consider also the OCZ Vertex 4. I got an Amazon Warehouse Deal of the 256gb version for $185. Just as fast and from an American company.

There is perhaps no better illustration of how far we've come than Crucial's new M500 SSD. For the same $600 asking price as the old X25-M, one variant of the M500 delivers a staggering 960GB of storage. Do the math, and you're looking at 63 cents per gig—an order of magnitude reduction in cost. How's that for progress?

Not really that much progress when comparatively I can yield roughly 18 Terabytes of storage for that same $600 through HDDs.

Well, sure, but are people clamoring for 18TB worth of storage on their desktops? In contrast, people have been begging for larger and larger SSD capacities.

It's crippling when that is what they are settling for when the competition is offering much better for the same size class of drive and for around the same price. As, I said, that makes no sense. Why would anyone buy the 240 gig model over the two drives I mentioned? Only if they were ignorant.

To be fair the write speed could go up later with a firmware update but as it stands I wouldn't buy the 240 gig or below models.

For performance reasons in a desktop case with a few drive bays spare I would always go for multiple SSDs over one large one, this allows you to set up a much more efficient system that takes advantage of the maximum bandwidth of your Sata 3 compliant motherboard.

My setup has two Samsung 840s set up with one as the OS/apps and the other for games and data.

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yeah I've been thinking about buying a ~500GB Samsung 840 drive for a while. This is slower than the Pro and the normal 840 is about $50 cheaper for a slight hit to write speed. For gaming and normal day to day I can't see the paying more for either the Crucial or the Pro.

Consider also the OCZ Vertex 4. I got an Amazon Warehouse Deal of the 256gb version for $185. Just as fast and from an American company.

OCZ shouldn't be considered if you value reliability. Their products continue to have quality control issues.

I'm just glad to see Crucial firing off a round that will surely drive high-capacity SSD prices down. We saw the ~120 and ~240 class SSD's fall in price in 2012, but they really haven't moved much this year. I think Crucial has always made good products, I'm very happy with my old M4, even though they had a rash of ill-behaving firmwares last year.

For performance reasons in a desktop case with a few drive bays spare I would always go for multiple SSDs over one large one, this allows you to set up a much more efficient system that takes advantage of the maximum bandwidth of your Sata 3 compliant motherboard.

My setup has two Samsung 840s set up with one as the OS/apps and the other for games and data.

I don't' think you know what you're talking about. A single large drive will perform just as well. Where are you getting this?

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yep. Have 3 Sammys at home and no problems at all, 8 at work no problems there either. 100% reliability gives little to complain about.

On the other hand... had 2 kingstons V100 disks:both were the most unreliable pieces of **** you can ever imagine. I will never buy from Kingston again if they are 25% of other companies. Lost data and a whole lot of precious time because Kingston can't get their crap straight.

11 "Sammy" drives with "100% reliability" and a shoot down example of 100% unreliability from the competition. Hmm.

Normally I am skeptical of such comments, especially when people start using pet names like "Sammy," but after the article of Samsung hiring people to post phony promotions of their products, I can only laugh at such a post. No offense intended.

I see no reason for why Crucial should hold longer than the Samsung. This review is pure win for Samsung, being faster and cheaper.

Yeah I've been thinking about buying a ~500GB Samsung 840 drive for a while. This is slower than the Pro and the normal 840 is about $50 cheaper for a slight hit to write speed. For gaming and normal day to day I can't see the paying more for either the Crucial or the Pro.

Consider also the OCZ Vertex 4. I got an Amazon Warehouse Deal of the 256gb version for $185. Just as fast and from an American company.

OCZ shouldn't be considered if you value reliability. Their products continue to have quality control issues.

I'm just glad to see Crucial firing off a round that will surely drive high-capacity SSD prices down. We saw the ~120 and ~240 class SSD's fall in price in 2012, but they really haven't moved much this year. I think Crucial has always made good products, I'm very happy with my old M4, even though they had a rash of ill-behaving firmwares last year.

Your information is much more dated than anything else and mostly to do with self install compatibility issues. OCZ pushed the envelope hard in the beginning when they first started becoming popular and there were issues which bit the less knowledgeable and understanding, which in turn hurt their reputation to a certain extent. A lot of that still lingers, like most bad experiences.

That was then. I know quite a few people with OCZ Vertex 4 drives, and I own one myself, and while some people had some install issues, they have been reliable thus far. I didn't have an install issue but I have had install issues with Crucial, a brand known for reliability, that ended up being as as reliable after the issues were ironed out.

The fact remains, whatever SSD you use, especially if you install yourself, it will not be unusual to run into issues, and mostly to do with the install itself. My recommendation is you are safe with most models of any of the leading brands. OCZ and Crucial both have excellent support.

People also need to stop thinking every future firmware upgrade is necessary. That's the main source of never ending issues. At the very least, if you can't resist, research new firmware thoroughly through other people's experiences before updating.

It's crippling when that is what they are settling for when the competition is offering much better for the same size class of drive and for around the same price. As, I said, that makes no sense. Why would anyone buy the 240 gig model over the two drives I mentioned? Only if they were ignorant.

To be fair the write speed could go up later with a firmware update but as it stands I wouldn't buy the 240 gig or below models.

I wouldn't trust OCZ for anything requiring reliability and longevity, otherwise they are great performers.The Samsung 840 Pro is great, but I had weird stability issues with two different units (and while Samsung's support was competent, they didn't have a solution for me) so I chose to unify everything on M4 rather than the 840 Pro despite better performances (I do not exclude a problem on my end, I just chose the convenience of a drive not minding it rather than finding out).

My experience with OCZ support has always been painful (with Vertex 1, 2, 3 and Agility 2, I've had trouble with 5 of the 8 OCZ drives I've owned), while it's been top notch with Crucial (1 issue with a M225, 1 with a M4, out of 12 drives), I haven't had to test Intel's or Mtron's support (besides, Mtron is now dead) but I didn't own enough units for it to be vaguely significant.

For performance reasons in a desktop case with a few drive bays spare I would always go for multiple SSDs over one large one, this allows you to set up a much more efficient system that takes advantage of the maximum bandwidth of your Sata 3 compliant motherboard.

My setup has two Samsung 840s set up with one as the OS/apps and the other for games and data.

I don't' think you know what you're talking about. A single large drive will perform just as well. Where are you getting this?

In the hypothetical case when heavy IO are being done to data on multiple drives at once you can get several times the performance of a single drive (ex with 2 drives 2x500MB/sec). However:

0) The frequency of that happening if you manually split the data between drives is going to be very low.1) Bypassing 0) with a RAID0 setup doubles your risk of losing everything.2) Unless you're running a database server, etc (in which case you need enterprise SSDs not consumer ones) the only time the difference will matter is in benchmarks. Even mehworthly SSDs like the sata2 inilinx based ones from a few years ago are fast enough that the difference between them and the fastest currently available drives isn't noticeable in normal use.